- Allen Ginsberg, “First Thought, Best Thought,” Loka: A Journal from Naropa
Institute, ed. Rick Fields (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975); rpt. in Gins-
berg, Composed on the Tongue, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1980), 106– - Again and again Ginsberg speaks of “natural” speech, spontaneity, the breath as
guide to measure, and so on. - See Ron Silliman, “Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry
Reading,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 365. Silliman’s is a seminal essay for un-
derstanding the limitations of reader-response theory. See essay 7 of the present text
for discussion of Silliman’s point. - See, on this point, George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). This, the ¤rst book-length study of
Language poetry, was largely devoted to the movement’s politics, drawing heavily on
Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten. - The most notable exception is Lyn Hejinian, who contributed essays and
manifestos to the early issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, for example “If Written Is
Writing,” and was coeditor, with Barrett Watten, of Poetics Journal. Another very dif-
ferent exception is Susan Howe, who combined not poetry and theory so much as
poetry and historical scholarship, negotiating in fascinating ways between the two
in My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1985).
A key volume that includes a number of women poets writing as theorists is Bob
Perelman’s Writing/Talks (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985). The
book contains Rae Armantrout’s “Poetic Silence,” Beverly Dahlen’s “A Reading: a
Reading,” Carla Harryman’s “The Middle,” Fanny Howe’s “Artobiography,” and Lyn
Hejinian’s now well-known “The Rejection of Closure,” rpt. in Hejinian, The Lan-
guage of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 40–58. - See, for example, Rod Mengham, Textual Practice 3, no. 1 (spring 1989): 115–24;
D. S. Marriott, “Signs Taken for Signi¤ers: Language Writing, Fetishism and Dis-
avowal,” and Anthony Mellors, “Out of the American Tree: Language Writing and
the Politics of Form,” both in fragmente 6 (1995): 73–91. Marriott’s essay, for example,
begins with the sentence, “It will be the argument of this paper that language writ-
ing, in its systematic attempt to empty the linguistic sign of its referential function,
replaces representation with a fetishistic substitute, that of the signi¤er” (73), the ref-
erence being to essays by McCaffery, Bernstein, Silliman, and Andrews. - Since 1999, when I wrote this essay, there have been a number of studies of
women Language poets. See, for example, Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A
Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press,
2000). Vickery provides an excellent corrective to earlier studies; at the same time, by
treating women poets in isolation, one loses the larger picture in which male and
female Language poets—for example, Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe—were
best friends and close associates. Again, since 1999 many women Language poets—
Kathleen Fraser, Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack—have published collections of their
essays, and so we now have a very different sense of the Language scene.
290 Notes to Page 162